Cisco Systems says that in 2016 the unit of data on the Internet will be the zettabyte, or a trillion gigs, as global traffic keeps rising.

Prepare for the zettabyte. That's how much data will traverse the Internet in 2016, according to a Cisco Systems report released last week. For those still bending their brain around the gigabyte, a zettabyte is one trillion gigs of data. In real-world terms, it's roughly $15 trillion worth of overage...